Work environment in robotized dementia care: how social robots affect care workers’ work practice and work environment

Primary Investigator:  Marcus Persson, PhD (Linköping University).

Collaborators: Clara Iversen, PhD (CESAR, Uppsala University) & David Redmalm, PhD (Mälardalen University).

Funder: AFA Insurance.

Duration: 2020–2022.

Project Description: Under the umbrella term “health robotics” a wave of innovative robotics are emerging as a response to new societal challenges connected to an ageing population. The aim of this project is to investigate how the use of social robots in dementia care influences the care workers’ work practices and work environment. The project draws on an inductive approach and includes ethnography, qualitative interviews, and multimodal conversation analysis to examine care workers’ practical and embodied practices in their everyday work-life as well as how they experience and reflect over how they organize their work.